How we exhume and re-constitute the permanent things in art and politics

Burke, Eliot and Kirk told us about the loss of the traditional themes, which Eliot called “the permanent things” in literature, art, film, and which are now replaced by nihilism, porn, egoism, etc. Traditional literature and art generally taught us about real human nature without being too didactic, teaching through analogy and allegory---the best art did it subtly with “imaginative persuasion.” But this great fall, this transvaluation of values, this presenting of nihilism, porn, and egoism was also taught to the people using analogy and allegory, although not always subtly. Why?

Essentially the transvaluation of traditional values was the will to power of the transvaluators. They tore apart Western tradition and Western people so that they could inherit what was left. And the transvaluators mainly picked the weakest link of spiritualism, using science to make the kill.

But what science kills it can re-constitute. The science of sociobiology has taught us about real human nature from the evolutionary perspective and it turns out that human nature as gradually defined by the evolutionary sciences is not that different from the permanent things of Burke, Eliot and Kirk, but with a few vital changes.

The evolutionary sciences have shown us that human nature is basically and genetically kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual, marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection. The addition and prominence of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and group-selecting as being natural to man, and not evil, is the biggest change and addition to the permanent things.

Political philosophy needs to affirm the implications of the biological origin of our social behavior---which points toward ethnostates and an ethnopluralism of ethnostates. This needs now to be taught with analogy, allegory, imaginative persuasion, and subtly. That is how we exhume and re-constitute the permanent things in literature, art, and film.